Hush Money (11 page)

He dropped the magazine when I came in, picked up a little cannon that was lying in his lap and pointed it in my direction. He motioned to me to sit down. I did, putting the bags gently on the floor.

Guns now. It had been a long time since I'd seen one—though I supposed Garcia hadn't been dropped by a spitball—and longer still since I'd had one pointed my way. I own one myself, but like Andy Ford with his grass I keep it at the bottom of a drawer.

“I guess you know why I'm here,” he said. “It'd save us both a lot of trouble if you just handed it over.”

“Handed what over?” I said.

He tried to look annoyed, but patience must have been a habit with him.

“The papers you picked off a certain party last night,” he said. “Papers that don't belong to you. Like a dozen sheets, say, handwritten.”

It didn't sound much like a will, but it could have been a journal. Or a piece of a journal.

“You've made a mistake,” I said, “but take a look around if it'll make you feel better. Feel perfectly free.”

“I already have,” he said. Probably he had at that, but as I found out later the place was neat as a pin, and if he'd so much as helped himself to a drink of water he must have rinsed the glass.

“You could try my car,” I suggested. “It's downstairs in the garage.”

“I did that too,” he said. He smiled a little. “While you were asleep.”

I guess you can't blame a guy like that for bragging a little the once in a while he gets the chance, but he gave himself away.

“You don't by any chance pilot a black Firebird, do you?” I asked him.

He didn't answer.

Sure, it figured. And when I'd slipped him the night before, he'd gone back to the motel and waited for me to show again. A bona fide detective then, a genuine private eye, what did you know? I thought of asking him to compare bank accounts, but then I thought better of it. After all, he was the one holding the surface-to-surface, and though I doubted he'd been paid to use it I didn't much want to test him.

One thing made no sense though. The night before I'd pegged him as a Diehl employee. But if he was working for the Diehls, how had he known where I'd gone? I sure hadn't told them, and I was pretty damn positive he hadn't trailed me to Ford's. In fact I hadn't told anyone.

Or had I? Before I saw the Diehls?

Because, another thing: if Garcia had been sent there to pick up a dozen-say-handwritten sheets of paper, who'd known to send him?

I could think of only one person.

Well, maybe I had no squawk coming at that. “I'm going to find out what happened to Karen,” he'd said, and maybe another way generals get to be generals is by not putting all their arrows in the same quiver. Just the same, it was a hell of a way to run a war, sending out the privates to make sure the other privates hadn't run off with the company payroll.

“Look,” I said. “Putting a few things together, I come up with the funny idea you and I are working for the same chief. And if that ‘certain party' you mentioned is the same one I've got in mind, that makes three of us Indians. And one of us is already dead, and another is holding a gun on the third. It makes no sense. How do we know there's not a fourth one downstairs ready to tomahawk whoever walks out the door? If you ask me, it's a hell of a way to run a wigwam.”

He considered that, considered me, and then he shook his head.

“I'm not interested,” he said.

So we sat there, and behind him the sky went purple and then blue again, a dark blue, with a sea mist rolling in to blot out the stars. Meanwhile the caviar I'd bought for dinner was slowly going sour on the floor. He was a patient little bastard all right. After a while he got up and put me up against the wall and searched me. According to the script I was supposed to jump him then, but it struck me that was the one sure way of making him use his artillery. And if he missed and I took it away from him, what was I supposed to do with him, mail him back to Beydon in a plain brown wrapper?

We both sat down again.

It was a standoff, pure and simple, and probably what took him so long to buy it was that he was being paid on a commission basis.

“O.K.,” he said finally, “have it your way. But chances are it's going to cost you one hell of a lot more than if you handed it over right now.”

“No hard feelings,” I answered. “If you have to tell him something, tell him I wiped my ass with it. You can even use my telephone.”

He was a very careful guy. He kept the gun handy all the way to my door, and probably while he waited for the elevator, and downstairs while he looked around for the tomahawk just in case, but I didn't follow him to see if he ducked.

10

I should have asked him to stay for dinner. As it turned out I ate alone, and that night I slept alone with my aches and pains and not so much as a dream, wet or dry, to brighten up the dawn. At first I didn't feel like company, and then when I did it was as though all the people I knew in the world had dried up and disappeared, including all my enemies ranging from 0 to 100 on the Screw Cage scale. By Saturday night I'd have settled for the biddy from the answering service, but she already had a date.

I know, I know, stories like this aren't supposed to work that way. Once the hero gets going he never stops, save for a piece of tail now and then, and a couple of days later it's all wrapped up in a bundle and everybody can turn out the light and get a good night's sleep. Be that as it may, the next thirty-six hours were a trip from nowhere to nowhere, and it got to me, and the only good thing that happened was that, lo and behold, my grease monkey showed up around six Saturday afternoon with the Mustang, fresh from the operating room and pretty as a picture.

Maybe I should have asked him too. I didn't. Instead I got drunk, blind falling-down drunk, stinko, and not up in my crow's nest either. I must have hit every watering hole from the Strip west before I let the Mustang take me home and put me to bed, and when I woke up early Sunday morning my head felt like a melon that'd gone from hard to ripe to mush to hard and was doing it again just for the hell of it.

I went down to the beach. The water was too cold to swim, and they had the yellow flag up in case anyone had ideas. I went out about half a mile to where they keep the mermaids and then back, fighting a rip tide the last hundred yards, not that the lifeguards gave a damn. I flopped on the beach and later, when the thundering herd got out of church and started trampling on my skull, I did it again. This time a couple of Andy Fords in the red underwear came sidling by in a motor launch to see if I needed help. I told them happily to stuff it, which cleared my noodle for good.

When I got home, I found a couple of pieces of mail propped up outside my door along with Sunday's
Times
. A letter and a package, and for a minute I thought the U.S. Postal Service had freaked out altogether. (I mean,
Sunday
deliveries? With a couple of hundred shopping days left till Christmas?) But the package had no stamps on it, and whoever had sent the letter had set it all up for Special Delivery and then changed his mind, because the cancel marks were missing.

I opened the letter first. It was an IBM job, typed on the stationery of Curie, Etc., Etc. & Curie of Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Bond Street and Timbuktu. In the old days we used to call them Dear Johns, and George S. Curie III had signed this one himself.

On the instructions of his client, George S. Curie III wrote, I was herewith and immediately and forevermore relieved of my duties in the matter which mutually concerned us. My services, for which I was thanked, were no longer required. The enclosed check, George S. Curie III believed, would amply recompense me, and should I have incurred any justifiable expenses I was to submit them in writing to his office. Furthermore, any and all property in my possession belonging to his client or his client's family was to be returned to his office no later than Monday morning, and I was to consider this letter as having put me on notice of same. Finally, in closing (would you believe?) George S. Curie III hoped he would have the pleasure of working with me again on some future project!

For a minute, I confess, I had one of those you-can't-fire-me-I-quit reactions. The miserable son of a bitch, Twink Beydon, I'd had my head handed to me mucking around for him out in the trenches and he didn't even have the decency to can me in person, much less in his own name!

But only a minute, and maybe a good deal less.

Because it meant something else too. It meant I was a free agent again, Lonesome Cage riding out in his Mustang. It meant all bets were off. It meant, in short, that I was free to open up shop on my own, no checks cashed, women and children last.

Because what else did the letter prove in this Age of Equal Opportunity, except for the fact that Twink Beydon had changed his mind again?

Then I took a look at the package.

It had my name on it, nothing more. There was no return address on the outer wrapping and nothing inside to tell me who'd sent or delivered it. In a way though, you could say it came from the grave, and if it was a bomb, it was the kind that doesn't explode until you've put on your proverbial pipe and slippers and settled down by the fire for a long winter's read.

A handwritten bomb too, though parts of it could have been carved with a knife. More like two hundred pages than twelve, in two of those spiral notebooks they sell around the campuses, and all of it Karie Beydon. I guess you'd call it a journal at that, though there wasn't much by way of dates and none of the today-I-had-tea-with-Lord-Rottencrotch. Karie Beydon's journal: a journal of hate and a journal of Daddy.

It crept up on you. The first time you ran into it, about a page and a half's worth right near the beginning, you thought: well, it's the oldest of stories, all kids hate their fathers sooner or later, and sooner or later it's got to come out. But around about the second or third entry, you began to say to yourself: this kid's really hung up on her old man, and the next time: Jesus! She really
means
it! And it made you feel a little sick inside, more than a little, but not so much that you didn't find yourself skimming the in-between parts so as to get back to Twink.

She tried and convicted him of every crime on the books, you name it, and she did it with a kind of shrill mockery that belonged to someone on the other side of the menopause, not a wild little number in jeans and lopped-off hair. Sometimes she wrote about them in the third person, herself included, and it was Twink and Karen, and also Nancy, and also Twink's Silver Star brother, and someone she called Twink's whore or, later on, Margaret. But other times it was like she'd had him right there and was laying it on him, else writing him a letter:
You
did this and
You
did that. Like: “You murdered my mother as surely as if you knifed her in the heart,” which later on became just a casual fact she referred to here and there: “before you murdered my mother” or “when Twink killed Nancy.” A lot of it was in the form of imaginary conversations between Twink Beydon and Karen, but it was hard to tell where fact stopped and imagination took over. Like Twink's whore, this Margaret. Who the hell was Margaret? Something gave me the idea she was a made-up character, but then just before the end there was a reference to “Twink's new whore, whose name is Ellen,” which took me to my longlost friend Miss Plager, which set me wondering whose place she'd taken in the squash court. I filed “Margaret” away in the back of my mind. And once near the end there was a sort of letter, or part of one, addressed to some brother she'd concocted for herself in a language that wasn't far from baby talk: “Brother Twinkie, let me tell you a thing or two about our Daddy,” but by the time you were done you'd have sworn there was a Twink Beydon Jr. and, lucky lad, that his big sister had just clued him in on the more gruesome facts of life, including the one that it was Twink who'd sent their uncle Alan off to war and death.

Facts? The truth? Like I say, it was hard to tell. In places not having to do with Twink there was plenty of clinical detail, such as the description of what she called “Billy's member” (a rather puny one, it seemed, belonging to the poet laureate Mr. Gainsterne), and another letter to Twink in which she described going over the border to Ensenada for an abortion, only to tell him in the end that she'd made it all up, and in such a way that you could hear a hard cold laugh echoing back at you off the pages. But if there was nothing there that would have stood up in court, still all that hate had to have come from somewhere, and I couldn't help but think about the one missing fact that might have had something to do with it, that secret only Twink Beydon himself was supposed to know about but which Robin Fletcher, for one, hadn't made up out of thin air.

If it was that, though, she never let on in the journal. It was never “my legal father” or “my stepfather” or “my fake father.” It was just Daddy Twink, loud and clear and with the blood still wet on the page.

I'll leave that part to the head-shrinkers. Probably they'd tell you all she was doing in those notebooks was trying to get his attention, and they'd tell you the same thing about her life, and also her death, and finally that all that father hate was really only love in disguise. Which explains in a nutshell why I've always resisted the temptation to spend fifty dollars an hour to hear the same things about myself.

As for the in-between passages, she'd taken a stab at philosophy, and she wasn't much good at it for my money. The same went for some pretty murky attempts at auto-analysis. There were pages of just description, nature etcetera, some quirky drawings which weren't half bad, and others she'd written when she was stoned where the handwriting went crazy and which made no sense even when I managed to decipher some of it. On the poetry, which was dotted all through, I'll have to let the poet laureate's opinion stand. “More potential than actual,” he'd said. To me it was pretty heavy stuff and forced, like she'd seen too many horror movies, full of bloodshot moons and knives, animals with bleeding eyes, sex-starved cunts, etcetera. Even there though, Daddy Twink was never far away, and in one there was even a little blind bird who kept saying: “Twink twike tweek twuck.” I guess it was pretty obvious where she got her inspiration.